DrD

yes, I had exact problem. Wheels have a down side and if it's not down the rover sinks into ground and won't move.

Landed this weird rover/ship on the Mun: Technically it's a VTOL as it lands on wheels with 24-77's facing perpendicular to the long axis of tanks. In this shot I just jumped off the lip of a crater going 26 m/s over the ground as a rover (with a little help from prograde RCS). I basically flew right over, had to fire up the 24-77's to land safely. On the way back to orbit I ran out of fuel before orbiting, and out of RCS. So Leroy bailed and got into orbit with jetpack. I undocked the aptly named lifeboat from my Munar station and picked him up. Good times, the rover was fun especially in IVA. I used the Mk1 cockpit.

Kerbal engineer redux gives phase angles also, in the rendevous tab.

I learned to dock just fine without Mechjeb. The tutorials helped a lot as did practice and understanding the mechanics. Now I can't remember why I thought it was hard.

I had some success with locking the suspension on the landing legs when landing, then after I drove my rover back under I unlocked suspension and used RCS transplant retrograde and the lander moved down enough for the ports to grab. I had to lock them initially because the rover was so close to the landing pads that with suspension unlocked I'd have broken the wheels. As it was with suspenson locked the rover wheels were very close to the surface.

Well I'm not sure I undertand your issue without a screenshot but I'll give it a stab: Your navball tells you nothing about the angle of the ports. So the port you're aiming for could be like 90% off and you'll get the exact same steering cues from the navball. There are several solutions: 1. control target vessel and orient its port towards your original spacecraft. The best way to do this is to use a fixed reference that is common to both craft. You can use prograde/retrograde or radial in/out but these will change over time so if you have to re-align you have to start all over. Scott Manley suggests using the normal/antinormal marker as this will NOT change during your orbit. Then go back to original spacecraft and point in the same but opposite direction. Now your ports will be aligned. The tricky bit is you now have to dock using only translation. Even harder is that your target marker and your prograde marker may be out of the visible portion of the navball. also remember to use this you have to change to orbit mode to see your normal/antinormal then back to target mode. You can rotate if you need to to see target marker but then you have to switch back to orbit mode and re-align to normal/anti-normal. 2. use a mod. FDAI gives the most help, in particular it lets you see prograde and target marker even when your orientation causes them to be off the visible nav ball. I use a simpler one called navball docking alignment indicator that just gives you another, red marker on navball that shows you where to point to be at the right angle. Thus if other markers are off the visible navball you can rotate to see them, correct, then rotate back to the red marker. Eventually you want all 3 (target prograde, prograde, and alignment) to match up.

Thanks, I'll look into that mod. This game has the best modding community ever. I think there must be a big overlap between those interested in space and in computer programming.

Now that I've started getting into planes (a bit) and playing around with reaction wheels on them, it occurs to me that it would be nice to be able to deactivate specific axes of the reaction wheels. For a plane for example I'd deactivate yaw but keep pitch and maybe roll. And for a rover maybe I'd just have roll on but not pitch or yaw. Seems simple to me but I'm not a coder.

Another concept that I find very interesting is this: If you burn just sideways to attain orbit, how is it that your altitude increases? The answer is simply that the planet curves beneath you, such that if you're going say completely straight sideways with respect to space then your distance to the ground will go up. In fact that's the very concept of an orbit, as you fall your forward velocity is such that the planet curves aways from you faster than you fall so you never hit the ground.

Well thanks for trying. It still for me comes down to fuel efficiency. You get more delta V from the same amount of propellant with a higher Isp. I understand that it says nothing about thrust, you may have to burn far longer for the same delta V with a different engine, but bottom line is how much fuel do I need for a given delta V? Higher Isp = less fuel. All the rest just complicates a simple concept and is only necessary if you're going to actually calculate how much delta V your design will give you. Like most of us I use a mod for this (KER.) And the gravity thing still escapes my understanding, I don't get why it's used as a conversion. I mean does earth's gravity just happen to have the exact value needed to convert one unit to another? It's like saying to get from pints to liters you should multiply by the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

Thanks that sounds like it. I'll say he was knocked out and would have recovered if I hadn't quickloaded.

So I was driving a rover on the Mun for the first time, and on my about 20th flip-over a weird thing happened. Poor Obrey went all rag-doll and I could no longer control vehicle. He stayed in his external seat. I thought he might be dead but I never got any kind of message about it. I thought I'd wait it out but got inpatient and quick-loaded. Sorry no screenie. So did I kill him or knock him out?

I gave up trying to fully understand Isp, now I just think of it like fuel economy in cars. Higher Isp = better mileage. Works for me.

Well what fascinated me when I first got into KSP was orbital mechanics in general, such as periapsis / apoapsis, transfer orbits, etc. Especially how thrusting prograde (forward) puts you into a higher orbit that overall is slower than a lower orbit such that to catch up to an object you need to burn retrograde (slow down.) Inclination changes are also interesting especially when you understand how making the change at apoapsis is more efficient. All these concepts can be demonstrated very nicely in map mode. Map mode is ideal for seeing how orbits change when you burn different ways. So if I was doing this paper, here's what I'd do: 1. learn about the concepts above. there are several good guides to basic orbital mechanics on this site and many here can answer the specific questions you'll probably have after reading the basics. 2. Use KSP in map mode to demonstrate basic orbital mechanics, including: a. circular orbits vs elliptical b. effect of burning prograde, retrograde, normal/antinormal, radial in/out c. Hohman transfer orbits d. circularization burns e. inclination change especially as it relates to current velocity. A good spot to discuss vectors and difference between speed (scalar) and velocity (vector.) f. You could also throw in surface speed vs. orbital speed and why rockets take off to the east. This can then lead to a discussion on relative motion in general and the whole theory of special relativity. You could use map mode to show how for example an orbit when viewed from the perspective of say the Mun is very different from the same orbit from the perspective of Kerbin. Map mode shows this very nicely. Hint: if you focus on Mun map mode will draw your orbit relative to the Mun, return focus to your ship and you'll see the orbit relative to Kerbin (if you're still in Kerbin's SOI.) I think all this would work best if you do a lot of video editing so you can just show the parts you want and perhaps cut back and forth to some diagrams on orbital mechanics. The specific sequence for a satellite launch would be: launch to the east establish circular orbit burn prograde to increase apoapsis (Hohman transfer orbit) inclination change at apoapsis (geosynch satellites need an inclination change I think) circ burn at apoapsis to change to a circular, geosynchronous orbit Anyway that's what I'd do.

I think that's just how the game works, for now. You always have to remove kerbals in the VAB or on the pad. My first rescue mission I had to rescue a kerbal orbiting in his spacesuit, I was so happy to pull off the rendevous then I couldn't get him in the MK1 because it was occupied. I didn't think to just kick him out and leave him drifting.

I can't see the pictures clearly enough to read the stats but what could be happening is a TWR that is too high. If your TWR firing all 3 engines is too high you'll waste delta V on the atmosphere. Whenever I add SRB I have to either decrease the tweakable throttle in the SRB or set stages so the LFE starts later as in your ship. As an experiment look at the TWR of your #1 ship (all 3 engines at once) and of the #2 ship. I'd guess in #1 it's way high and in #2 it's lower. Now go back to #1 and adjust the throttle on SRB down until TWR is the same as in #1 and your delta V may be closer. The only prob with adjusting throttle on SRB down alot is now you're carrying their weight longer, so often it's still more efficient to burn them at 100% and let your LFE idle until they're done. KER tells you how long engines burn and if the burn time of SRB is close too (or longer htan) the LFE you will lose much of the benefit of staging. The general rule is keep your TWR around 1.6 while getting rid of stages ASAP. Higher results in losing to atmosphere (or even burning up with DRE), lower means staying in the gravity well longer than needed, and can lead to control problems. With SRB this very often means keeping the LFE for stage 2.

This looks awesome. KSP definitely has the best modding community ever. 3 quick questions: I read in your description that the parts include LF/Ox tanks. Can engines use this directly? Or do you need a fuel line and is this practical? Or do you just transfer the fuel into a connected tank? How do the fuel cells etc work if you don't have a life support mod? Is there any point to them other than as another way to get power? Is there a part list somewhere? I'm looking forward to not having all kinds of stuff hanging off my spacecraft. Thanks in advance.

It was more popular before they released some of the extra-large engines and tanks. Before then the only way to get a heavy payload up was to use multiple rockomax parts. Because the joints are somewhat delicate it's not practical to build multiple stages up, so one's forced to build sideways. In that scenario you may as well use asparagus to get rid of as much mass as quickly as possible. For smaller rockets I tend to use SRB also. You need to make sure TWR is not too high or you'll waste fuel fighting the atmosphere. I use KER and if necessary tweak the thrust of the SRB in the VAB. Sometimes is easier to just stage my liquid fuel engine to fire after SRB's are done rather than at the same time.

RCS!!! Now that I'm more experienced I use RCS a lot more to adjust trajectory. As you know, the further away you are from your destination, the greater is the impact of small changes in trajectory on your eventual encounter. When I burn for the Mun or Minimus, I find it very difficult if not impossible to burn exactly right, such that my final trajectory is not like my plotted trajectory. This is because being off even by 3-10 m/s can alter your final encounter significantly. The solution, rather than trying small prograde/retrogade burns to fine tune, is to simply use RCS to fine-tune after your initial burn from Kerbin. Keep pointing prograde and fire RCS either prograde (H) or retrograde (N). You'll find that your plotted orbit changes slowly but surely and you can then fine-tune it exactly (although you may have to turn cap-locks on). Last night I was leaving Kerbin to rendevous with my Munar space station, using RCS I was able to fine-tune my burn to get an exact perapsis at the Mun of 40K. You can also adjust the other parameters. It's really nice that you don't have to rotate all around, just use RCS up/down for normal/antinormal, left/right for radial in/out. Using this technique you can convert your trajectory to a polar orbit or whatever. Since you're still far even relatively small RCS firings can completely change your eventual orbit. This is a lot better and more efficient than trying to burn your main engine once you're in orbit. It's even better during rendevous. I had a hard time with my final tuning of encounter until I learned that the main engine, even at low thrust, is still too coarse an adjustment. It's awesome to burn RCS pro or retro and watch the encounter markers slowly move together. I can easily get my markers to 1-2 kilometers using RCS for final adjustment. Interestingly this technique is used in RL. In Apollo the majority of mid-course corrections were made using RCS. They only used the main engine (SPS) once just so they could get data on its performance. They burned it for like 2 seconds (they called it a burp.) Using RCS a lot more has really helped me in this game. I need a bit more monoprop but way less LF/Ox.

I've had this problem frequently with Steam, the solution for me (and many others according to my research) is to turn off anti-virus scanner temporarily.

Well I kind of got it working, I removed the fairing ring and re-installed, then it worked. It stopped working again later but the same trick got it back. Not sure why it's gone flakey on me but I can live with it. Great mod, really adds to the immersion.

Help! I've enjoyed this mode for awhile, now all of a sudden it's not working right. When I add fairings, they don't show up as a stage and can't be assigned to an acction group: clicking on the fairing brings up its name in action group window but there's no jettison option. Only thing I did differently is install FDAI. I've tried uninstalling FDAI, re-installing PF, but nothing works. Thanks.

Where were you last week?!? Good idea, never even occured to me. Not ruthless enough I guess.

I think the node is where the orbit crosses the equator, at least I've seen it defined that way. It's a geographic reference in this case 216 degrees longitude. Now I have no idea how to tell longitude on Kerbin. Hopefully someone will tell us. So you inclined orbit can't be inclined any old way but must cross equator at 216 deg longitude. As always I could be very wrong.

Just remember to save a seat for him in capsule. I learned that one the hard way, like so many other things. Either the 3-person capsule with one empty seat or the Mk1 with a probe core will work. Just remember to remove crewman (crewkerbal?) prior to launch.